We develop novel solutions for image-based rendering techniques, in particular developing solutions that will allow highly realistic virtual experiences of existing sites, such as Çatalhöyük.

Another research focus of the group is on head-mounted display (HMD) technologies, and in particular perceptual studies to determine which display solutions reduce fatigue for virtual reality.

In particular, we focus on one known source of discomfort: the vergence-accommodation (VA) conflict. The VA conflict is the difference between accommodation (focus at the screen) and vergence (eyes turning towards a target at a given depth).

We have recently published a research paper on this topic and a video which was presented at the prestigious ACM SIGGRAPH conference this summer, and will appear in the top journal of our field ACM Transactions on Graphics.

We developed a new device that allows us to measure accommodation (the actual focus of the human eye) when viewing an HMD screen, and performed experiments on different viewing conditions, including a design with focus-adjustable lenses.

Our results show that only the focus-adjustable-lens design drives accommodation effectively, while other solutions used by previous systems (e.g., depth-of-field blur) do not drive accommodation to the simulated distance and thus do not resolve the VA conflict. Our results also show that focus-adjustable lenses reduce discomfort significantly more than other solutions.

This research result is important in guiding choices of display technologies in virtual and augmented reality settings, such as those in EMOTIVE.

Working with the EMOTIVE Hunterian Museum’s Personas

We thought it would be timely to introduce the personas we have also developed for the Hunterian museum and the Antonine Wall display and how we used them at the 1st EMOTIVE User Experience Design Workshop in Glasgow in February. Each persona we designed for the Hunterian museum is an individual person, that is they have sole identities detailing their own character and behaviours (backgrounds, hobbies and interest); their relationship with technology (type of devices they own or are comfortable using and software they have access to); and specific challenges they bring to a museum visit or frustrations they have (views on museums and heritage, interpretation and technology used in museums, accessibility issues) (image 2).

Combining individual personas to design group experiences

Our own research on the Hunterian visitors, as well as that carried out for the CHESS project that some of our EMOTIVE partners had worked on before (Katifori et al. 2016) confirmed what is reported in the literature; that most people visit museums in groups as museum visiting is a social activity (e.g. Falk & Dierking 2012; Falk 2016; Hein 1998).

Therefore, the five individual Hunterian personas were created with this in mind and any two (or more) individual personas are able to be combined to create a group persona: for example Carlos (a 25-year-old Engineering Erasmus student who doesn’t like reading lots of text panels in museums) and Susie (a 21-year-old Hunterian MUSE volunteer guide who is also a Museum Studies Masters student) may bump into each other in the museum, they get chatting about the display at which point Susie shows the EMOTIVE tool to Carlos and they decide to use it together.

Or the persona of Susie could be combined with that of Mary (a 71-year-old Friend of the Hunterian and grandmother who wants to pass on her love for objects and heritage to her grandchildren) and Annie (Mary’s 15-year-old granddaughter who is bored by museums but wants to do something nice with her granny) to create a different group scenario.

How we have used the personas in our work so far

We were able to test the personas at our first user experience design workshop in February (images 1 and 3) and again during a seminar with students from the Glasgow School of Art Heritage Visualisation MSc in May 2017 (image 4). During both sessions we split our workshop participants into groups and asked each group to design an EMOTIVE experience for their designated persona or personas.

IMAGE 4: Introducing the Hunterian personas to students and staff from Glasgow School of Art Heritage Visualisation MSc (Glasgow University, Hunterian Museum, May 2017)

Although all workshop participants were presented with individual personas, they understood that they needed to take into account how any individual persona’s needs and characteristics would affect a group dynamic and that this was key to the success of any experience they designed. The participants reported that designing group experiences for more than one persona was challenging but important. For example, the group designing an experience for Mary and Annie (the grandmother who wants to pass on her love for objects and heritage to her grandchildren and the granddaughter who is bored by museums but wants to do something nice with her granny) felt that this was an “interesting and challenging combination” because of the differences in what they individually wanted to achieve with the visit tempered by the fact they were visiting together.

Similarly, the group designing for Carlos who gets talking to Susie in the museum “understood that from the conception of the experience, this had to be something that would engage two different people with very different reasons for visiting.” This group noted that “interacting not only with the materials but also with each other was a crucial factor” to the success of any experience.

So, throughout this process we had to ask ourselves: How do you cope when in a group one person dominates or “leads” the experience? Is it always the person you expect who has the biggest impact on an experience? What different ways are there of coping with people who dominate the situation?

By creating multiple individual personas and asking our workshop participants to design experiences for different combinations of them, we were drawn to thinking about how individual behavioural characteristics might impact on the same design task at hand, which in turn allows us to think about how to balance differing user needs.

IMAGE 5: Workshop participants enjoying the dramatisation of the EMOTIVE application they designed for The Hunterian Antonine Wall display in February 2017 designed

At the end of the design process we asked our participants to dramatise the experiences they had designed. Yes, dramatise! And the groups obliged by getting with gusto into the character of their personas as well as, in some cases, the EMOTIVE application itself, creating some laughs in the process… (image 5). This dramatization of ideas using the “entire body” is also called “bodystorming”, a technique often used in interaction design and creative development (Simsarian 2003). The idea was for the participants to imagine what it would be like if the product (or EMOTIVE experience, in this case) they designed existed, and act as though they were using it. Dramatising the experience and personas within the Antonine Wall display allowed the groups to really think about how the personas would physically interact together, within the actual display space and allowed the research team to think further about group experience dynamics. The dramatisation was fun and we enjoyed seeing our personas “come to life”. The overall experience of using the personas helped all groups focus on real users and for the research team integrate a participatory, user-centred approach when co-designing EMOTIVE experiences.

The concept of the ‘persona’ is something which has been utilised in management, advertising and the technology industry since the term was first coined by Alan Cooper nearly twenty years ago (see Cooper, 1998). Used to aid in product design and the development of experiences for customers, clients, guests and other product users, a ‘persona’ is a fictional character created with the specific needs and desires of a potential end-user in mind. But what, we hear you ask, does this have to do with the EMOTIVE project and collaborative storytelling?

Well, to tell a story you must have an audience. And to tell a good story you must know your audience. The same goes for experiences at cultural heritage sites, where it is imperative to know the types of people visiting a site in order to cater for them. In recent years, we’ve seen museums and other cultural institutions turning to personas to develop their offerings based specifically on the demographics and complex habits of their visitors (see CHESS’ interactive digital storytelling project for an example of this, and specifically ‘A Life Of Their Own‘, its paper on the subject). Personas are arguably the perfect solution for developing a tailored cultural visitor experience.

The problem is that most existing work with personas has entailed the use of singular personas. In other words, the user is presumed to be an individual who can be fully captured in a solitary fictional identity. But research shows that people visiting museums and heritage sites usually do so in groups, whether as part of an educational or other tour, with family or friends (Falk, 2016; Falk and Dierking, 2012). A singular persona in these contexts ignores the social complexities of visiting, and limits our understanding of how we might encourage interactions and productive relations between and within typical visitor groups. (For more on the complexities of the visitor experience see López Sintas et al., 2014).

One of our cultural partner sites, the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Çatalhöyük, provides the perfect opportunity for developing interesting visitor relations through the use of group personas. Study of over 15 years’ worth of demographic and observational data from visitors to Çatalhöyük proves that the overwhelming majority tour the site as one of five groups: local parents with children, international families, local families, mixed groups of local and international families, and larger bodies of people such as tourist and school groups.

Members of the EMOTIVE project, Sophia Mirashrafi, Laia Pujol, Vassillis Kourtis, Katrina Gargett and Sara Perry, are currently testing and evaluating a collaborative digital storytelling experience for groups on site in Turkey right now. By creating a series of group personas for Çatalhöyük, and testing the efficacy of them in our workshop at Glasgow in February, the team has tailored the experience based on the actual types of visitors we see at Çatalhöyük. Using this novel method of experience design is an important step towards the success of EMOTIVE, and one we see as relevant to all curators, heritage managers and cultural experience designers who aim to cater realistically to the goals and needs of their visitors.

IMAGE: Two users (in the foreground) test a prototype digital group experience inside the ‘Vulture Shrine’ replica at Çatalhöyük while two EMOTIVE team members look on. [Photo by Sara Perry]

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Cooper, A. (1998). The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Indianapolis: Macmillian.

The Çatalhöyük Research Project is developing a chatbot for the site and is looking for participants to contribute to its evaluation. Have you ever chatted with a bot before? Here is your chance! If you are interested in taking part in the Facebook Messenger chatbot’s evaluation please send the Çatalhöyük Research Project a private message on Facebook and they will tell you more!

Moreover, for the next 2 weeks, the Çatalhöyük Research Project’s social media will be taken over by the Çatalhöyük’s Visualisation Team! The team is made up of staff and students from the University of York & the EMOTIVE Project. They will bring you the life & stories of the humans of Çatalhöyük, both modern & Neolithic, to connect the past with the present. Make sure to follow their adventure on Çatalhöyük’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. We can’t wait to see some behind-the-scenes material from all the exciting work they are up to in the next two weeks!

The Çatalhöyük is one of our two cultural partners and you can read more about it here.

OUR WORK: EXUS’s experience of the Emotive project to date

Nine months have passed since Emotive started and it’s been a really busy but also exciting time at EXUS, where we coordinate all the activities of the project. It’s our role to support the team and keep everything moving, in good time, and in harmony. It is a little like being in a small orchestra!

Directed by our conductor (Dimitris), our first violin section (Hara (concertmaster), Stella (violoncello), Elena (viola)), coordinates the project activities and makes sure that they run smoothly, efficiently and effectively. We overview all partners’ work and collaborate with them closely to ensure that all deliverables are submitted within the time schedule.

Our percussion section (Anastasia) is responsible for all logistics, the arrangements of the trips and meetings, taking care of the Emotive team’s special needs as well as the external participants, as was the case in the workshop held in Glasgow.

And our brass section, aka technical gurus (Kostas (lead trumpet), Odysseas (trombone), Angelos (cornet), Savvas (clarinet), Spyros (horn), Zisis (tuba), Theodora (trumpet)), have most recently been working closely with Emotive’s technical team to define the architecture and the system functional specifications that will support the production of the Emotive’s experiences.

Our EXUS orchestra communicates with all partners regularly through teleconferences, to share our progress and schedule the project’s next steps. And because we need face-to-face contact too, we also organise regular meetings.

The kick-off meeting where we all gathered together for the very first time and exchanged our ideas and ambitions for the project was very promising for the future of the project. Our latest project meeting, held for three days in our premises in Athens at the end of May, focused in aligning the works of the user partners and technical partners.

Over the summer, all partners are working on the development of independent modules that will be integrated in the alpha release. The work continues and our little orchestra plays on – music to my ears!

With the help of this bi-annual newsletter, we’ll keep you updated on the happenings of the EMOTIVE project and ‘emotive storytelling’ in general. You can expect insights into our work, updates on our progress and links to many exciting topics related to the project, storytelling and cultural heritage.

So here’s to the start of a new project discovering, exploring and telling the stories hidden in our cultural heritage!

OUR WORK: Diginext’s experience of the Emotive project to date

The edutainment team of Diginext is very enthusiastic to be part of this fantastic consortium and work on the EMOTIVE project. Some members of the team already had the occasion to work in the cultural heritage domain by participating to the CHESS project and their enthusiasm stimulated everyone. We are all eager to offer our authoring tool and see it used to create great storytelling experiences!

Since the EMOTIVE kick-off, we have closely followed the work of the end users, especially at the 1st workshop, and the innovative use cases they imagined to realise with our tool. Then, Rémi and Alexandre have dedicated their efforts to analyse how to adapt the outcomes of the MAGELLAN project to support these new scenarios. Indeed, this project features powerful building blocks oriented towards general game creation, which we can reuse in the cultural heritage world, on the condition that we customize them to the needs and liking of our users.

Moreover, under the technical coordination of ATHENA, we synchronised with the other technical partners to create a complete architecture combining all our tools in a coherent solution. This has of course been the occasion to rekindle relationships with previous partners and to get to know new ones as well as discovering our respective works.

Our team is really looking forward to work directly with end users to create original experiences for the EMOTIVE project and put them directly in the hands of visitors for them to deeply engage with our end user’s stories.

Storytelling applies to nearly everything we do. Everybody uses stories, from educators to marketers and from politicians to journalists, to inform, persuade, entertain, motivate or inspire. Storytelling becomes an even more powerful tool when it taps into our emotions.

We are all storytellers to some extent. Do you remember the last time you have told a story to your friend, family member, colleague or a stranger? What it was about?

On the Emotive Twitter and Facebook accounts we often share interesting resources, articles and topics related to storytelling. Here we would like to share with you a number of interesting factsheets, offered as ‘a free resource for storytellers and those wishing to promote storytelling events’ by the Society for Storytelling.

Our multidisciplinary team has been actively working on many aspects of the project in tandem. As a first taste, early on in December 2016, our archeologist-storytellers Francesco and Katerina used our authoring tool to quickly whip up some prototype stories for the Ancient Agora of Athens, which explored the power of love and war.

The 1st EMOTIVE user workshop that followed engulfed us all in a creative frenzy. In this context of user requirements elicitation and user experience design, Akrivi and Maria, our modern-day renaissance women, worked closely with the heritage partners at the University of York (YORK) and the University of Glasgow (UGLA), to start forming and consolidating the first version of the project’s conceptual framework for emotive storytelling experiences for cultural heritage, available also in card format.

Meanwhile, Manos, Emotive’s technical manager par excellence, and software engineer wizards Vassilis and Ektor, are working with the project’s techies to define the architecture that can support the experiences-to-be with advanced graphics and interactivity, virtual, mixed and augmented reality, 3D printed artefacts, even artificial conversational entities. Stavros, our AI expert, along with the University of York are currently designing a chatbot that will allow visitors to converse with cultural heritage site experts. And Yannis, who is also President and General Director of the Athena Research Center at large, has been waving his wand over our team’s research efforts.

The ATHENA research team has been working on interactive, personalised, mobile storytelling since the CHESS project. EMOTIVE has brought to the team the exciting chance to continue previous fruitful collaborations but also form new ones with talented researchers and companies in the project’s consortium. For us, this project is opening up a range of possibilities in learning how to craft engaging experiences for on-site and virtual visitors of cultural heritage sites.

Did you know that the Emotive project collaborates with several major European Research and Technological Development initiatives?

Throughout the project we’ll be drawing on the experiences of the CHESS, MAGELLAN and PLUGGY projects as we research and develop the prototype Emotive software platform.

MAGELLAN (http://www.magellanproject.eu/) is coordinated by Emotive partner EXUS and DIGINEXT SARL (DXT) also participated in the project. Its vision is to establish a web platform for cost-effectively authoring, publishing, executing, and experiencing location-based games featuring Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The project is based on the CHESS platform, but extended to author mixed reality games that take place in the real world and involve multiple participants. Emotive aims to extend Magellan by bridging the gap between both forms of experiences: single- and multi-participant as well as supporting adaptation of experiences involving groups of visitors.

The CHESS project (http://www.chessexperience.eu) was coordinated by Emotive partner DIGINEXT SARL (DXT) and the University of Athens also participated in the project. CHESS implemented a system for the authoring and experiencing of non-linear, location-based story-like experiences for museum visits. Emotive aims to draw on the research and findings from this work to author experiences involving groups of visitors through capturing real-time interactions within these groups.

PLUGGY (https://www.pluggy-project.eu/) provides a social platform and a series of pluggable applications that aim at facilitating a continuing process of creating, modifying and safeguarding heritage where European citizens will be consumers, creators and maintainers of cultural activities. It enables users to access content ranging from localized specific content to comprehensive personalized stories and to experience Virtual Exhibitions through applications, covering a variety of technologies from Augmented and Virtual Reality to collaborative games for mobile devices.

The Pluggy team is organising the 1st International Workshop as part of the INTETAIN 2017 conference, June 20–22, 2017 in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. The Paper Submission deadline is 14 April 2017. Find out more here.